Upstart/Systemd war over - Ubuntu to switch to systemd

By Andrew Powell, published 15/02/2014

The popular but at times controversial init/system management daemon known as systemd looks to be becoming the de facto init standard in the Linux world as Ubuntu decides to switch to systemd in place of Upstart. Mark Shuttleworth revealed the upcoming changes in a blog post titled 'Losing Graciously'.

In what must have come as a shock to many, the Valentine's Day blog post by Shuttleworth revealed to the Linux community that in light of the recent intense and much publicised debating and voting by the Debian Technical Committee for the next default init system for Debian Jessie, it would only make sense to migrate to what turned out to be the winner of the Debian init debate, systemd, being that Ubuntu is based on Debian.

Mark Shuttleworth wrote:

[...] Nevertheless, the decision is for systemd, and given that Ubuntu is quite centrally a member of the Debian family, that’s a decision we support. I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously. It will no doubt take time to achieve the stability and coverage that we enjoy today and in 14.04 LTS with Upstart, but I will ask the Ubuntu tech board (many of whom do not work for Canonical) to review the position and map out appropriate transition plans. We’ll certainly complete work to make the new logind work without systemd as pid 1. I expect they will want to bring systemd into Ubuntu as an option for developers as soon as it is reliably available in Debian, and as our default as soon as it offers a credible quality of service to match the existing init. [...]

While the complete migration won't happen for some time yet, the decision by Canonical to move from Upstart to systemd is a fairly significant one and most likely also has ended any of the internet "wars" of Upstart vs. systemd that can be found in various forums and mailing lists and marks the increasingly adopted systemd as fast becoming the standard in Linux init systems.

Creator of systemd, Lennart Poettering, wrote in a Google+ post that "this was a tough decision to make for Ubuntu! I am pretty sure it wasn't easy for them. I certainly believe it is the right decision, of course" and that he and the systemd community looked forward to working with Ubuntu in the future.

About the author

Andrew Powell is the editor and owner of The Linux Rain who loves all things Linux, gaming and everything in between.